jams 11 (3) pp.

279–291 Intellect Limited 2019

Journal of African Media Studies

Volume 11 Number 3
© 2019 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams_00001_1

FRANCIS B. NYAMNJOH
University of Cape Town

ICTs as Juju: African

inspiration for understanding
the compositeness of being
human through digital
technologies

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this article,1 I liken information and communication technologies (ICTs) or digi- digital humanities
tal technologies to what we in West and Central Africa have the habit of referring ICTs
to as Juju. I invite as scholars of the digital humanities to see in the region’s belief digital technologies
in incompleteness and the compositeness of being human, as well as in the capac- Juju
ity to be present everywhere at the same time an indication that we have much to Africa
learn from the past on how best to understand and harness current purportedly incompleteness
innovative advances in ICTs. The idea of digital technologies making it possible compositeness
for humans and things to be present even in their absence and absent even in their spyware
presence is not that dissimilar to the belief in what is often labelled and dismissed
as witchcraft and magic that lends itself to a world of infinite possibilities – a 1. This article is an
improved version of
world of presence in simultaneous multiplicities and eternal powers to redefine a paper delivered as a
reality. The article argues in favour of incompleteness as a normal way of being. It Keynote Address at the
challenges students of humanity to envisage a relationship between humans and 2019 Digital Humanities
Conference on the
digital technologies that is founded less on dichotomies and binary oppositions,

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

theme of ‘Complexities’, nor on zero-sum games of conquest and superiority. If humans are present in
Utrecht University, The
Netherlands, 9–12 July
things and things in humans, thanks to the interconnections, the flexibility and
2019. fluidity of being that come with recognition of and provision for incompleteness, it
is important to see things and humans not only as intricately entangled, but also
as open-ended composites.

ON INCOMPLETENESS
I am Francis Beng, I presume, Nyamnjoh. I was born, I presume, without
any of such labels that I have been assigned or have acquired through my
life journeys and in my encounters with others – individuals, cultures, world-
views, belief systems and modes of social organization and practice. I grew
up in West and Central Africa where we believe, organize and conduct our
lives around the idea that everything in the world and in life is incomplete:
nature is incomplete, the supernatural is incomplete, Humans are incomplete,
and so is human action and human achievements. We believe that the sooner
one recognizes and provides for incompleteness as the normal way of being,
the better we are for it. We also believe that because of their incompleteness,
people are not singular and unified in their form and content, even as their
appearance might suggest that they are. And so are things. Fluidity, compos-
iteness of being and the capacity to be present in simultaneous multiplicities
in whole or in fragments are a core characteristic of reality and ontology of
incompleteness. West and Central Africa is a region where interconnections
and interdependencies are recognized and celebrated, and used as the domi-
nant and desired template for organizing relationships among humans, and
between humans and the natural and supernatural worlds.
It is in recognition of incompleteness that humans in West and Central
Africa are ever so eager to seek ways of enhancing themselves through rela-
tionships with other humans, and in using their creativity and imagination to
acquire magical objects that can extend themselves in their relationships with
fellow humans and with the whims and caprices of natural and supernatural
forces/agents. Such magical objects, which in the language of modernity are
referred to as technologies, are more commonly known in West and Central
Africa under local names that I have roughly translated as Juju. The cosmolo-
gies and ontologies that lend themselves to such beliefs and practices have in
the past been, and still largely continue to be mischaracterized and disparaged
as witchcraft, sorcery, paganism, superstition and primitivism. Paradoxically,
not even the currency of new information and communication technologies
(ICTs) championed by the digital revolution is seen as a redeeming factor for
such cosmologies and ontologies, beliefs and logics of practice.
Yet, ambitions of dominance and superiority through conquest and
refusal to acknowledge debt and indebtedness aside, it becomes evident
that the future belongs with such disregarded popular beliefs and practices
informed by the reality of incompleteness. If the ordinary human at the state
of nature is incomplete, all efforts at seeking to enhance themselves through
relationships with fellow humans and through borrowings and technolo-
gies, far from making them complete, points them to the humility of being
composite and in acknowledging and providing for their debts and indebt-
edness to others – humans, nature and the supernatural. Incompleteness
is an enduring condition in that, the quest for extensions in order to repair

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 ICTs as Juju

one’s state of incompleteness, only makes one to realize one’s incompleteness

when confronted with all manner of extensions that one has not mastered.
Moreover, extensions tend to work only partly and for some of the time, and
some of them actually undermine the degree of completion one thought one
had achieved. The fact that completeness is an illusion that can only unleash
sterile ambitions of conquest and zero-sum games of superiority, is an invi-
tation to explore, contemplate and provide for a world of open-endedness,
interconnections, fluidities and conviviality; a world in which no one has the
monopoly of power or powerlessness, a world in which humans and things
complement each other and double as one another.

THE COMPLETE GENTLEMAN

The late Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola – author of The Palm-Wine Drinkard,
and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, published respectively in 1952 and 1954
in London by Faber and Faber – was a genius at depicting the universes of
incompleteness popular across West and Central Africa. One example from
The Palm-Wine Drinkard illustrates the point of this talk superbly.
The story revolves around a very dependent, overly materially endowed
drunk, who believes that he is independent because of the predictable regular-
ity of service and servitude he receives from his faithful harvester of palm wine.
Then, all of a sudden, he is made aware of just how dependent he really is,
when the palm wine harvester and provider falls from a tall palm tree and dies.
In the course of his quest for his palm wine provider who has suddenly dropped
dead, the Drinkard, comes to a town where a beautiful girl has been lured away
by the ‘Complete Gentleman’ into the distant bushes inhabited by curious crea-
tures. It happens that the ‘Complete Gentleman’ is not that complete. There is a
lot less to his glitter and dazzle than meets the eye. His charm and handsome-
ness are less than skin deep. Indeed, almost everything about him belongs to
others. He is in every way a composite being – a sort of Ubuntu human.
He belongs with a community of curious creatures deep in the bushes
who are reduced to a bare-bones lifestyle – they live their lives as skulls. When
the wind blows their way rumours of a young beautiful girl in a distant town
who repeatedly turns down every suitor, this curious creature reasons that a
girl who turns down every man’s hand in marriage must want as husband an
otherworldly man. So, he decides to try his luck by embarking on a journey of
self-enhancement through borrowing body parts from others along the way
to the town of the girl with high standards. He borrows all the body parts he
needs, as well as a lovely outfit and a horse. As a composite being, he felt truly
handsome. In Tutuola’s words, the skull-turned human thanks to his borrow-
ing became the ‘Complete Gentleman’.
As soon as the girl sets eyes on him, she abandons everything and every-
one and decides to follow him. He was as gentlemanly as he appeared to be
complete. He warned the girl repeatedly that there was a lot less to him than
met the eye. But the girl insisted that she had found what she desired: a truly
handsome gentleman – the realization of her fantasy. Her eyes knew what
they had seen. At the crossroads, he warned her for the last time, but when
she insisted, he branched off and took the path leading back to his community
deep in the bushes.
As junctions of myriad encounters, crossroads in Tutuola’s universe are
significant in the manner in which they facilitate creative conversations and
challenge regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities
and achievements. Being the gentleman that he truly was, and having acquired

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

the wife he had set out to win, the man began the process of self-deactivation
by returning all the things and body parts that he had borrowed for the occa-
sion and paying the price he had agreed with the lender. The bride learned
too late how deceptive appearances sometimes are. If only the  ‘Complete
Gentleman’ was not so much of a gentleman as to insist on recognizing and
paying back the debt of things and body parts he owed others, he just might
have continued to live a lie.
What does this teach us about the relationship between digital tech-
nologies and humans? The story invites us, as scholars of humanity and its
extensions, to emphasis interconnections and interdependencies, in our
perspectives. The story invites us to embrace incompleteness as a normal state
of being and becoming, by systematically disabusing ourselves of zero-sum
aspirations to superiority. It invites us as humans to embrace and relate to
technologies as things and relationships that supplement us as much as they
uncomplete us. It is an invitation to see the relationship between humans and
technologies as a non-linear conversation on the entanglements or intricacies
between change and continuity, nature and culture, past and present, tradition
and modernity, the human and the non-human.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AS JUJU

In this article, I liken ICTs or digital technologies to what we in West and
Central Africa have the habit of referring to as Juju. I invite you as scholars
of the digital humanities to see in the region’s belief in incompleteness and
the compositeness of being human, as well as in the capacity to be present
everywhere at the same time an indication that we have much to learn from
the past on how best to understand and harness current purportedly innova-
tive advances in ICTs. The idea of digital technologies making it possible for
humans and things to be present even in their absence and absent even in
their presence is not that dissimilar to the belief in what is often labelled and
dismissed as witchcraft and magic that lends itself to a world of infinite possi-
bilities – a world of presence in simultaneous multiplicities and eternal powers
to redefine reality. The popular world of West and Central Africa – a world
of flexibility, fluidity and incompleteness that was dismissed and continue to
be disparaged – is one in which time and space are not allowed to stand in
the way of the truth and its nuanced complexities. It is a world that we have
come to understand a great deal better only much later with the advent of
new ICTs such as the Internet, the cell phone and the smartphone, along with
their ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’ of instant availability and reachability, as well as
their propensity to facilitate narcissism, self-indulgence and the keeping up of
appearances.
Granted that we, scholars of the digital humanities, have learnt the right
lessons from unequal encounters fuelled by ambitions of dominance, and
above all, that there is often a lot less or a lot more to things than meets the
eye, there is need to think less in dichotomies and explore interconnections
even among apparently unlikely bedfellows. The digital may not be the hyper-
rationalized world apart from that some of us would wish, nor is it necessarily
a less authentic experience from our everyday lived offline realities. With this
in mind, it could be argued that the future is firmly in the past and the unfold-
ing present, even as we continue to claim and provide for creative innova-
tion. The West and Central African tradition of self-extension through creative
imagination that privileges cosmologies and ontologies of interconnections

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in myriad ways holds great promise for theorizing the intersections between
humans and ICTs.
Juju, as used in this address, is a technology of self-activation and self-
extension – something that enables us to rise beyond our ordinariness of
being, by giving us potency to achieve things that we otherwise would fall
short of achieving, were we to rely only on our natural capacities or strengths.
It is true that our bodies, if well cultivated, could become phenomenal Juju,
enabling us to achieve extraordinary feats. But even such technically trained,
programmed or disciplined bodies are likely to encounter challenges that
require added potency. In other words, while our bodies have the potential
to be our first Juju, they eventually require additional Juju for us to be effica-
cious in our actions. As we have gathered from the example of the Complete
Gentleman above, the writings of Amos Tutuola and the universes he depicts
are replete with examples how humans, the natural and supernatural worlds
summon creativity and imagination through Juju to interact with one another,
and to make evident that no single agent (human or non-human) is free of or
has the monopoly of incompleteness.
Any of us remotely familiar with Amos Tutuola’s writings would know
what I mean by Juju, as well as understand the ubiquitous presence of Juju in
the universes which Tutuola choreographs and depicts. The same is true with
those of us familiar with social life in West and Central Africa. The follow-
ing passage, from Tutuola’s novel, The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town, on
how the brave hunter of the Rocky Town prepares for the long and dangerous
journey to see the Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town for a cure to his wife’s
barrenness, captures remarkably the centrality of Juju as a great activator in
Tutuola’s universe and its rites of passage:

I entered my room and I first drank one keg of the palm-wine. Then I
wore my hunting dress, I wore many kinds of Juju in my loin, I wore
many on my neck, both on my elbows and limbs. Several others which
were the skulls of snakes, birds of prey, lizards, etc. were tied on my
huge cap and I put it on my head. Having dressed like that, I took my
bow and the poisonous arrows. Many kinds of Juju were tied on every
part of the bow as well. Then I hung the bow and arrows and my long
and heavy matchet on my left shoulder. Then I put the Juju ring which
could make a person invisible on one of my left fingers.
[…] Having equipped myself like that, again I drank one keg of the
palm-wine […] then I staggered from my room to the outside of the
house […].
As I knelt down before the people, and as I began to shake from feet
to head for the intoxication of the powers of all the Juju which I wore
and as well for the power of the strong palm-wine which I had drunk in
the room, so they all prayed for me. After the prayer, each of the people
including my mother, father, my wife, her mother and her father, hung
several kinds of Juju gourds all over my dresses, head, neck, breast, loin,
etc. After all these Juju gourds were offered, I did not waste time at all
but I stood up and I started my journey immediately.
(Tutuola 1981: 23–24)

To Tutuola’s nimble-footed, border transgressing, quest-hero narrators such as

the brave hunter of the Rocky Town, things such as Juju (spells, charms, magic,
etc.) can make a difference by enabling the hero or heroine to transform

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

themselves into something else when hard-pressed by their adversaries or

the formidable challenges facing them, and to revert to their forms of origin
after the danger, challenge or adversary has been overcome. Tutuola’s charac-
ters employ the technique of metamorphosis extensively as a means of self-
protection and as a facility to display the potency of their Juju when confronted
by other beings with overwhelming powers or Juju of their own. A digital era
parallel to the above preparation for a journey of a thousand dangers and
unpredictability would involve wearable technologies such as Fitbit activity
tracker watches, along with smartphones and high-range four-wheel drive
cars that are armed with Google Maps and GPS navigators, related apps,
automatic weapons and kindred accessories.
The more Juju a person has at his or her disposal the better their chances of
being efficacious, for not only do Juju work best in combination, but they also
tend to disappoint or to let their owners down when the latter need them the
most. We as students of digital media know this only too well. Even with our
purportedly perfected modern Juju (technologies built to perform with scien-
tific precision and reliability), there is no absolute guarantee that, however
potentially powerful such Juju are, they will work when one summons them to
enhance one’s potency. The fact that Juju often rely on a complicated network
of interconnections to function properly is an added and humbling complica-
tion and a deterrence to any propensity for hubris. Equipping or extending
oneself with purportedly more scientific and technical Juju such as computers
(desktops or laptops), cell phones (basic or smart) and other mobile devices
(tablet, iPad) is still no guarantee that these will not freeze or deactivate them-
selves just when one needs them the most.
It is perhaps for this reason that the Juju men and women of West and
Central Africa do not shy away from the use of modern/scientific technolo-
gies (smartphones, tablets, iPad, etc.) alongside what some prefer to call
their  ‘African electronics’. They used these blends of traditional and modern
Juju for self-activation and extension, and to enable them to meet and attend
to clients in multiple locations outside their villages, in towns and even in
other continents. A simple Google search for words such as marabout in
France, Canada or Belgium, for instance, would take you not only to websites
and contact details of marabouts in Senegal, Mali or Niger, but to their offices,
agents, phone numbers and schedules abroad. In Cameroon, for example, it
is not uncommon to find diviners summoning diasporic Cameroonians on
computers, smartphones and tablets to appear and answer to the afflictions
and predicaments of concerned relations left behind.
Just as one needs Juju to activate oneself, some Juju equally need activa-
tion by other Juju to be effective. Hence the need to constantly lubricate rela-
tions with one’s Juju supplier – witchdoctor, soothsayer, diviner, manufacturer,
software maker, service provider or whoever has supplied one the Juju, which
are almost always accompanied by strict instructions to be followed scrupu-
lously. The insistence on interconnections and interdependencies suggests
a perception and an approach to life, sociality, encounters and relationships
that is cognizant of the importance and centrality of charging, discharging and
recharging. One can only stay permanently charged if one is in splendid isola-
tion, disconnected, aloof and inactive. Even then, one’s charge risks leaking
or wasting away (draining itself out unproductively for lack of interactivity)
and with that, one’s life eventually also drains away with little to bequeath to
society and to the world, which have given so generously to one. To be social
and in relationship and interaction with others requires and simultaneously

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makes possible actively charging, discharging and recharging oneself as well

as the others involved. Discharging within relationships is not a wasteful exer-
cise as it entails charging others (energy expended is not necessarily energy
depleted), just as recharging entails drawing from the charge of (or being
energized by) others. Symbiotic relationships and sociality are full of charge,
discharge and recharge. As long as one loses one’s charge to others in a social
relationship, that cannot be considered as sterile leakage or wastefulness, as
long as recharge or reactivation is possible. Tutuola’s universe of prevalence of
Juju and interventionist natural and supernatural forces is a universe in which
everything is possible, and thinking the unthinkable is currency thanks to the
circulation of charging, discharging and recharging.
Although set in his native Yorubaland, Tutuola’s Juju-centred stories are
common throughout Africa, where the belief is widespread that there is a lot
more and a lot less to people and to things than meets the eye, just as there
is much more to life than Cartesian logic. Many an ordinary African credit
people with an ability or a capacity to be present in many places at the same
time, and to be able to see, feel, smell and hear things that are not tangi-
ble and visible in ordinary terms. Put differently, they believe in the human
capacity to decipher the multiple spices and ingredients of being human and
to discern interconnections despite an appearance of discontinuities. In reli-
gious circles, we would capture this ability to be everywhere and nowhere at
the same time as a godlike ability for presence in simultaneous multiplicities.
God the omniscient and omnipotent is also omnipresent – something which
human beings, in their singular and unified ordinariness, and in their obses-
sion with completeness and superiority cannot be. Like the god of informa-
tion and communication, digital technologies, thanks to their compositeness
of being, and to the interconnections and interdependencies that activate the
fullness of their potency, have the equally godlike capacity of present absence
and absent presence. And like with God, humans who embrace digital tech-
nologies can feel themselves activated to formidable levels of omniscience,
omnipotence and omnipresence, provided everything works according to plan.

HIDDEN ACTIVATORS: FROM DIVINERS AND WITCH HERBALISTS TO

SOFTWARE MAKERS
As one of Chinua Achebe’s proverbs on invisible power goes,  ‘[w]hen we
see a little bird dancing in the middle of the pathway we must know that its
drummer is in the near-by bush’ (Achebe [1964] 1974: 40). To be able to claim
godlike attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence, humans
must seek to enhance their ordinary selves with extraordinary activators –
Juju – defined as techniques and technologies of self-extension. Hence, the
widespread belief in West and Central Africa that, ordinary though we are as
humans, our ability to be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent can be
significantly enhanced by Juju (which include but are not confined to charms,
spells, concoctions, potions, etc.). Such Juju is usually specially prepared by
clairvoyant or spiritual experts who are known in different contexts by different
names (in parts of Cameroon these are people of ngang; in parts of Nigeria they
pass for babalawo; and in parts of southern Africa, they are sangoma). Reliance
on Jujus, charms, spells and clairvoyance might seem primitive and irrational,
but these are part of the potency repertoire from which we draw agency in
view of the fact of our incompleteness. In this regard, as argued above, Juju are
not much different from the supposedly more scientific, rational and modern

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

technologies of self-extension with which we are familiar (photos, computers,

Internet, cell phones, smartphones, mass media, social media, books, electric-
ity, washing machines, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, etc.).
Indeed, on 22 June 2019, I came across an article on the BBC website that
buttresses this point. Titled ‘Is there a spy in your pocket’, the article discusses
the phenomenal, growing and disturbing powers of software designers in
the age of digital technologies and the surging potency of algorithms. It is
no longer beyond imagination for hackers to remotely install spyware in our
smartphones that enables them to access all our content, including encrypted
messages, and allows them to remotely control the microphone and camera
without our knowledge. Such software is currently being developed and sold
to repressive governments interested in tracking the work of journalists, activ-
ists, lawyers and public intellectuals critical of them. Some of such sophisti-
cated espionage software is reportedly so powerful that it is  ‘classified as a
weapon, only to be sold under strict conditions’. According to Mike Murray, a
cybersecurity specialist in San Francisco,

The operator of the software can track you with your GPS […] They can
turn the microphone and camera on at any point and record everything
that’s happening around you. It steals access to every social media app
you have; it steals all your pictures, your contacts, your calendar infor-
mation, your email, every document you have. […] It literally turns your
phone into a listening device that they can track you with – and it steals
everything on it.
(‘The spy in your pocket’ 2019)

Such spyware makers are not dissimilar to a spirit medium in the bushes of
West and Central Africa drumming their clients and protégés into intoxicating
frenzies of fearless overindulgence in full view.
These developments are confirmed and expanded upon by Edward
Snowden, the whistleblower American computer systems administrator who
stole classified information from the National Security Agency and passed it to
the press, and who subsequently escaped into exile in Russia. In an interview on
16 September 2019 with Brian Williams, the host of MSNBC’s ‘The 11th Hour’
on the eve of the release of his book Permanent Record, Snowden acknowl-
edges that  ‘hacking has increasingly become what governments consider
a legitimate investigative tool’ (Snowden 2019: n.pag.). Governments, he
argues, ‘use the same methods and techniques as criminal hackers’ (Snowden
2019: n.pag.). They seek  ‘to remotely take over’ (Snowden 2019: n.pag.) the
electronic devices of their citizens and those they spy on by detecting and
taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the software of the electronic devices
used by the citizens and targets in question. Once a government successfully
hacks its way into the device of the target, they are able to remotely launch
and control the device, and are able to do with it, remotely, anything that the
rightful owner of the device can do. ‘They can read your email, they can collect
every document, they can look at your contact book, they can turn the location
services on, they can see anything’ (Snowden 2019) that is on one’s phone,
laptop or tablet. Snowden adds that sometimes governments do not need to
hack devices directly, if they have the collaboration of big technology compa-
nies (Snowden 2019).
They can simply ask Google for a copy of our e-mail box because Google
saves a copy of that. Everything that you ever typed into that search box,

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 ICTs as Juju

Google has a copy of. Every private message that you’ve sent on Facebook,
every link that you’ve clicked, everything that you’ve liked they keep a perma-
nent record of. And all of these things are available not just to these companies
but to our governments as they are increasingly deputized as sort of miniature
arm of government (Snowden 2019).
Snowden illustrates such government spying on their citizens and critics
in response to a question on the role of government hacking and tracking of
electronic devices in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, ‘a Washington Post
Reporter and a primary critic of the Saudi regime’ (Snowden 2019). According
to Snowden, the government of Saudi Arabia managed to hack the phones
and related devices of its critics with technology that  ‘they purchased […]
from a digital arms broker company called the NSO group, an Israeli company’
(Snowden 2019) that specializes in the  ‘manufacture of digital weapons’
(Snowden 2019) or ‘hacking tools that can be used against the critical infra-
structure that all of us rely on, the phones in our pockets’ (Snowden 2019).
NSO ‘sell this capability to break into phones of people around the world for
millions and millions of dollars to some of the worst governments on earth’
(Snowden 2019), and with little to no oversight or ethical considerations.
According to Snowden, the Saudi government could not have harnessed the
knowledge on Jamal Khashoggi to act the way they did, without the assistance
of such technology (Snowden 2019):

He [Jamal Khashoggi] was lured into the Saudi Arabian consulate in

Istanbul, in Turkey and while his fiancée waited outside for him to get
the paperwork he needed in order to marry her, he was murdered by the
Saudi government allegedly on the orders of the Crown Prince. Now
we have to ask ourselves how did the Saudi government decide that
he was worth killing? How did they decide when and how they would
kill him? How did they know this opportunity was going to arise? How
did they know what his plans and intentions were that they needed
to stop from their perspective? We don’t have evidence that his phone
personally was hacked unfortunately because we do not have his phone.
But we do have the phones of his friends who were living in exile in
Canada and we do know thanks to the research of a group called the
Citizen Lab affiliated with the University in Canada that their phones
were hacked which means their conversations with Jamal Khashoggi
were intercepted and this allowed the Saudi regime to know that he was
intending to create an electronic protest movement. They didn’t need to
know from his friends’ phone or even from his phone that he was trave-
ling to the consulate because he had to make an appointment. But it
did tell them his private intentions, his hopes and dreams for a different
government for their country. And perhaps – although we do not know
for sure – on that basis they decided to murder him. Once your phone is
hacked, what is in their hands is not simply your device, it is your future.
(Snowden 2019)

When they are not at the service of repressive governments and states, spyware
makers collaborate with the big technology corporations to mutually enhance
their potency economically, often to the detriment of individuals who will-
ingly and unsuspectingly deliver themselves, their personal data and privacy
to be preyed upon. Both the high-tech companies and their spyware suppliers
depend on algorithms that, as Snowden puts it,  ‘are fuelled by precisely the

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

innocent data that our devices are creating all of the time, constantly, invisibly,
quietly’ (Snowden 2019). Both spyware makers and dealers in data basically
make money by monitoring and monetizing the privacy of the users of various
social media platforms and digital consumer applications. By way of example,
Facebook clients such as the now defunct Cambridge Analytica are able to use
the facts gathered from the browsing histories of Facebook users to create a
web of disinformation online, inviting those entrapped to click on things that
make them think things are happening, when it is actually an invitation to live
in a truthless (post-truth or post-consensus) world, available and amenable
to being manipulated ad infinitum by the hidden persuaders who control the
algorithms that make that world possible. Thanks to the algorithms at work
non-stop, the everyday communicative activities of people the world over with
access to any networked electronic device are being meticulously recorded,
processed and placed at the disposal of advertisers and other seekers after
total control of humans, mind, body and soul.
In a speech at the United Nations on 24 September 2019, British Prime
Minster Boris Johnson expressed a similar concern with what he termed the
growing ‘Digital authoritarianism’ (NS Tech 2019) of the digital age. According
to Johnson, ‘in future there may be nowhere to hide’ (NS Tech 2019) if current
practices by big Tech companies are not regulated and controlled. Using
Google as an example, he argued: ‘[y]ou may keep secrets from your friends,
from your parents, your children, your doctor – even your personal trainer –
but it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google’ (NS Tech 2019).
Johnson spoke of a future at the mercy of a ‘great cloud of data that lours ever
more oppressively over the human race’ (NS Tech 2019) in the following terms
(NS Tech 2019):

Smart cities will pullulate with sensors, all joined together by the ‘inter-
net of things’, bollards communing invisibly with lamp posts
So there is always a parking space for your electric car, so that no bin
goes unemptied, no street unswept, and the urban environment is as
antiseptic as a Zurich pharmacy.
But this technology could also be used to keep every citizen under
round-the-clock surveillance.
A future Alexa will pretend to take orders.
But this Alexa will be watching you, clucking her tongue and stamping
her foot
In the future, voice connectivity will be in every room and almost every
object: your mattress will monitor your nightmares; your fridge will
beep for more cheese, your front door will sweep wide the moment you
approach, like some silent butler; your smart meter will go hustling – if
its accord – for the cheapest electricity.
And every one of them minutely transcribing your every habit in
tiny electronic shorthand, stored not in their chips or their innards –
nowhere you can find it, but in some great cloud of data that lours ever
more oppressively over the human race
A giant dark thundercloud waiting to burst and we have no control over
how or when the precipitation will take place and every day that we tap
on our phones or work on our iPads – as I see some of you doing now
– we not only leave our indelible spoor in the ether.
(NS Tech 2019)

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To Snowden, ‘[t]hese activity records are being created and shared and collected
and intercepted constantly by companies and governments’ (Snowden 2019).
What is actually being collected and sold, he argues, is more than just infor-
mation: ‘what they’re selling is us, they’re selling our future they’re selling our
past, they’re selling our history, our identity, and ultimately they’re stealing
our power and making our stories work for them’ (Snowden 2019). This is
evidence not only of the manipulability of social media, but also of the fact
that the cheap and affordable delivery of goods and services made possible by
social media come at great costs to privacy and individual freedoms. With digi-
tal technologies in a context of zero-sum games of power, opportunities come
with opportunism. Just as people employ digital technologies to extend them-
selves and establish intimacies, so too are the very same technologies actively
employed to distant people from collective ways of thinking and doing that
they have internalized and naturalized.

JUJU: A NECESSARY EVIL?

Yet, despite their contradictions and manipulability, life would be very ordi-
nary, predictably standardized and routinized without the exciting sense of
adventure and ambition that the ever-unfolding creative effervescence in
Juju (technics and technologies) brings. The very idea of creative innovation
would be dead, as individuals and societies would lose the ability to impro-
vise and reinvent themselves. This highlights the importance of Juju in soci-
ety and social relationships. Individuals and collectivities use Juju to influence,
persuade and control situations and others, and to overcome and complicate
adversities in ways that would otherwise not be possible without their reper-
toire of Juju.
With the ubiquity of Juju should be associated the idea that power, far from
concentrated in the hands of a few, is actually something that comes and goes,
often without warning. However powerful a person is, he or she is always
seeking to enhance themselves with extended body parts and extra senses on
the one hand, and Juju (technics and technologies) on the other. One cannot
be too sure, so one must never rest on one’s laurels. Complacency is a danger-
ous thing in a world of impermanence, where there is always more or less to
things and people than meets the eye, ear, nose, mouth, heart or any other of
our sensory organs. This should sensitize us more to the need to cultivate and
champion a disposition to take the outside in and inside out.
Just as life is full of hierarchies informed and sustained by inequalities,
so too are there inequalities and hierarchies among Juju. The more powerful
one’s Juju, the better one’s chances of being, seeing, doing, feeling and smell-
ing things, tangible and intangible, as well as of influencing and controlling
other people, things, events and phenomena. Juju can be used either alone or
in combination with others, in order to maximize their potency. With a good
Juju (take the case of drones), one does not need to be physically present to be
efficacious in one’s actions with those one is seeking to influence for good or
bad, in love or in hate. Nothing brings this home better than the capabilities
of a well-resourced (with applications and contacts) smartphone – one of the
most sensational Juju in vogue – with access to Wi-Fi, a hotspot, or Bluetooth,
in the age of social media, supra connectivity and the growing imperative for
conviviality.

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

CONCLUSION: INSPIRATION FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS AN AREA

OF SCHOLARLY INQUIRY
I have argued above in favour of incompleteness as a normal way of being.
I have challenged us, as students of humanity, to envisage a relationship
between humans and digital technologies that is founded less on dichotomies
and binary oppositions, nor on zero-sum games of conquest and superiority.
If humans are present in things and things in humans, thanks to the intercon-
nections, the flexibility and fluidity of being that come with recognition of and
provision for incompleteness, it is important to see things and humans not
only as intricately entangled, but also as open-ended composites.
I would like to end with a few questions that are relevant to the study of
the intersections between digital technologies and being human.
To what extent does the idea of incompleteness challenge us to rethink
our current approaches to digital humanities as a field of study? Would more
inter- and multidisciplinary conversations informed by the reality of intercon-
nections and interdependencies challenge us to contemplate conceptual and
methodological conviviality? If yes, what form would they take? And would
factoring in the interconnections within and between categories such as race,
ethnicity, culture, geography, class, gender, sexuality and age affect the form
and content of such conceptual and methodological conviviality? Beyond
the conceptual and methodological implications of doing digital humanities
research, what does it mean to actually understand and relate to ICTs in terms
of incompleteness as a philosophy of personhood and agency?
As a field, digital humanities would be truly enriched by a disposition to
accommodate improvisation and innovation. In support of this, let me draw
on another Chinua Achebe proverb, from his novel, Arrow of God: ‘[t]he world
is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place’
(Achebe [1964] 1974: 46). The idea of digital humanities as a dancing mask
is suggestive of its potentials to become a truly inclusive field of inquiry that
continues to enrich itself through its open-ended encounters and conversa-
tions with the creative diversity of subjectivities of a truly universal humanism.

REFERENCES
Achebe, C. ([1964] 1974), Arrow of God, African Writers Series, Oxford:
Heinemann.
NS Tech (2019),  ‘“A giant dark thundercloud of data”: Read Boris Johnson’s
UN speech in full’, NS Tech, 24 September, https://tech.newstatesman.
com/policy/boris-johnsons-un-speech. Accessed 29 September 2019.
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2017), Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can
Change Our Minds, Bamenda: Langaa.
Snowden, E. (2019), interviewed by Brian Williams, the host of MSNBC’s ‘The
11th Hour’, Monday 16 September, https://www.nbcnews.com/msnbc/
news/edward-snowden-says-government-your-phone-insists-he-only-
wanted-n1055171. Accessed 17 September 2019.
‘The spy in your pocket’ (2019), File on 4, BBC Radio 4, UK, 16 June, 5 p.m.
Tutuola, A. (1952), The Palm-Wine Drinkard, London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1954), My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1981), The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town, London: Faber and
Faber.

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 ICTs as Juju

SUGGESTED CITATION
Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2019),  ‘ICTs as Juju: African inspiration for understanding
the compositeness of being human through digital technologies’, Journal
of African Media Studies, 11:3, pp. 279–291, doi: 10.1386/jams_00001_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a professor of social anthropology at the University of
Cape Town. His most recent publications relevant to the theme of this address
are: Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds
(2017), and The Rational Consumer: Bad for Business and Politics: Democracy at
the Crossroads of Nature and Culture (2018).
Contact: Anthropology Section, University of Cape Town, 5.23 AC Jordan
Building Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa.
E-mail: Francis.Nyamnjoh@uct.ac.za; nyamnjoh@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4702-8874

Francis B. Nyamnjoh has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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